So I was at the Mill Woods Recreation Centre in southwest Edmonton with my daughters the other day and, after splashing around in the wave pool, we headed to the cafeteria for a snack. (I brought fruit; they demanded popcorn; I gave in.) While sitting there, I noticed about 20 Asian men in an adjacent classroom, and when there was a break in their lesson they hit the concession counter for baskets of fries. Turns out they were all welders from Thailand who are in Alberta under the federal government’s temporary foreign worker program. The class they were taking was a certification course so they could work in Alberta, mostly fabricating machinery that’ll be used in the oilsands sector up in Fort McMurray. unlimited is starting to do some digging on the role (and, some would charge, plight) of foreign workers in Alberta; the government recently opened up the types of jobs that foreign workers are eligible for. Please contact me at drubinstein@unlimitedmagazine.com if you have any thoughts, or info, that could work its way into our coverage of the issue somehow.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Daily Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.